He influenced water policy, helped bridge a thorny dispute on the Truckee River, made sure the beauty of Lake Tahoe was preserved. He brought millions in for both urban airports, money that would have been diverted to other states.

Reid changed the direction of the federal judiciary, and I don’t mean nationally. He helped elevate minority Nevada candidates who would never have had a chance, including a guy named Brian Sandoval more than 10 years ago, conveniently also taking the then-attorney general out of competition against him (although Sandoval left the bench to defeat Reid’s son, Rory, for governor in 2010).

Reid’s fingerprints are everywhere in the state because of his ability to make deals with the other side and also force through appropriations the other side did not want.

“One of Senator Reid’s real strengths was the fact that a lot of people underestimated him,” said ex-Nevada Gov. Bob List, who went up against Reid as a lobbyist for the nuclear industry. “This guy really knew the rules. He knew how to leverage his strength, how to go to which people (to help him).”

The contours of Reid’s rise to power are now well known. The son of Searchlight, a speck on the Nevada map, who surmounted a hardscrabble upbringing and his father’s suicide to become a state lawmaker in the late ’60s, the youngest lieutenant governor in Nevada annals at 29, the ill-fated Senate run in ’74 and subsequent disastrous Las Vegas mayoral bid in ’75 that should have ended his career.

But it did not.

“He is resilient,” Bryan recalled. “He is relentless. He is always strategic. Everything he did in those intervening years was designed to get him back into the political arena.”

Tapped by his mentor, Gov. Mike O’Callaghan, for a seat on the Gaming Commission, Reid used that as a springboard to Congress and then the Senate. His drive propelled him to leadership and the majority leader’s job in 2007, and the rest is….

Reid has proven adaptable, changing with the times because he really evolved or read the polls he claims to eschew. He was against immigration reform before he was for it. He was against gay marriage before he was for it.

Reid also had the political foresight to recognize that he needed to reform the Democratic political machine after he nearly lost to John Ensign in 1998 (it is now formidable), and he was the first Nevada politician to recognize the potency of the Hispanic vote, which helped save him in 2010.

He is the ultimate political survivor, willing to do almost anything to keep going, never in doubt that he will win.

***

Reid has endured despite a prickly relationship with the media, a profession he always seemed to consider a necessary evil but one for which he had little patience. He treated perceived enemies in the Fourth Estate as he did political foes. (The only exception is the Las Vegas Sun, where his friend, editor Brian Greenspun, has gone out of his way to protect him and advocate for him.)

I have written before about how Reid has refused to talk to me during a couple of periods in my career, including since 2011, this time for perceived slights to his family. The stories were legitimate—how he helped get his son, Josh, a job as city attorney by calling the mayor and council members and how he funneled money to his granddaughter’s jewelry business. But Reid did not just refuse to appear on my television program; he tried to get me fired, and more than once.

Reid called his close friend, the late Jim Rogers, who owned all the NBC affiliates in the state that until late last year aired my program. The senator complained bitterly about my coverage.

Rogers summoned me to his office or called me more than once in the year or so before he died in June. “He said, ‘Ralston is trying to bury me and my family,’” Rogers told me Reid had told him. Rogers actually canceled the program once—I managed to persuade him otherwise—after hearing from Reid. Rogers explained to me more than once how much he owed Reid, thus making my coverage more problematic.

Rogers told me more than once that Reid had helped influence bankers on his behalf. And Reid also used his clout to help Rogers move my program to a better time, prompting the senator’s chief of staff, David Krone, to email me to tell me he had landed me a new prime TV slot on the NBC affiliates. I was astounded.

Even though I managed to stay on the air at Rogers’ stations, the Reid specter was always there. Others may not have been so lucky. After they spent the 2010 campaign going after Reid, Las Vegas Review-Journal publisher Sherman Frederick and editor Thomas Mitchell were suddenly cashiered right after the senator survived. In this case, there were no Reid fingerprints, but many had only one suspect.

There will likely never again be a Harry Reid for Nevada, which will thrill some and depress others. He has been the giant among men and women during the last three decades, controlling the political world here more than any other (he also made Nevada an early-caucus state, this increasing his and Nevada’s clout) and altering the course of history for politicians, industries and individuals.

One longtime pol said Reid’s retirement may be the “news of the century for little Nevada. Under him we were the mouse that roared.”

And now the state will soon be reduced to a squeak, a nuisance without any protection, easily trapped by more senior delegations and powerful special interests. Despite his prodigious achievements and influence, what happens to Nevada in the post-Reid world may well say more about his legacy than anything that happened during his tenure.

Jon Ralston, contributing editor at Politico Magazine, has covered Nevada politics for more than a quarter-century. He has worked for both major Las Vegas newspapers and now has his own site, email newsletter and television program.